A Year in Reading: Thomas Beckwith

Related Books:

This was a year of short stories, of picking up a book around midnight, when common sense dictated I should have been asleep, and refusing to set it down until two or three, at which point there was basically no hope of salvaging the following morning. This year was too hectic for grand scopes and labyrinthine plots. If I was lucky, those few evening hours in which I got to read wiped out the detritus of the workday, replacing them with voices and characters that scattered at the sound of my phone’s alarm. For a while I’ve thought that short stories, more so than other forms, are perfectly suited to adult life, if only because they accomodate the low-level amnesia of the stressed. The chronically busy person reads Alice Munro, say, and gets her brief hit of human frailty, which she then takes with her to the post office, or the doctor, or dinners packed with relatives.

I needed dependably good work, in other words, which is why, back in May, I picked up the latest Rivka Galchen book, American Innovations, on the morning it came out. (On Kindle, mind. I haven’t camped out for anything since I was young enough to hoard Transformers.) In 2010, just before the end of my post-college underemployment, The New Yorker released its 20 under 40 list, which included several authors I was already a little bit obsessed with. I read through the entire collection in the space of a week, envying the skills on display in the entries by Karen Russell and Wells Tower, among others. But it wasn’t until I got to “The Entire Northern Side was Covered with Fire,” Galchen’s perfect tale of a pregnant writer whose husband has left her, that I felt too dazed to go through with my schedule of planned errands and tasks. Written in the looping, contradictory sentences of a very smart person in shock, the story is tragic and wry, unveiling the deceptions of the narrator’s husband through a series of confessions by her friend. When I was finished, I felt embarrassed that I hadn’t heard of this writer, who understood with a rare clarity how the mind tries to reckon with turmoil.

That piece, with slight modifications, appears in American Innovations, as do several other examples of first-class work. A remarkable thing about the collection is how well it captures the messiness at the heart of civilized life. In “The Region of Unlikeness,” a woman who befriends two odd, pretentious strangers comes to realize, after hearing one of them detail his eccentric view of space-time, that one or perhaps both of her new friends are painfully, incurably disturbed. In “Wild Berry Blue,” a woman meets a gyro shop worker who looks exactly like her dead father, inspiring reflections on “the vast distances between nuclei and electrons.” In all the book’s stories, the mysteries of science and philosophy, of meticulously organized attempts to find order in a baffling universe, are kin with garden-variety moments of unreality. They incite a sense that bewilderment is the sanest reaction to the world.

Of course, I read other things, too. These included Flying to America, a posthumous collection of characteristically wacked-out Donald Barthelme stories, as well as The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which can function as a bible for a certain kind of person. (I am that kind of person.) And I also read more stories by Barry Hannah, the freewheeling, half-drunk uncle I always wish I’d had. But none of these books, great though they were, occupied me in quite the way that American Innovations did. As one of the book’s characters puts it, “there’s your life, and then you get a glimpse of the vastness of the unknown all around that little itty-bitty island of the known.”

That island is where I live. That island is where all of us live. Let’s not kid ourselves about how far out we can see.

Thomas Beckwith
is a staff writer for The Millions and an MFA candidate at Johns Hopkins. Prior to coming to Baltimore, he studied literature and worked in IT while living in Dublin, Ireland. You can find him on Twitter at @tdbeckwith.

This was my first year reading in public. I mean, I’ve always read books on transit and in parks, ever since I first learned how to attach meaning to the little symbols that make up words. But this year, I kept a public reading journal, where I have written about 50 books. For the most part I read only really good books, because I have never felt compelled to finish reading anything just to say I have. Of the 50, there were only a handful I wouldn’t gladly read again; about seven books that were truly excellent, in both intent and execution; and two that I had to read twice, because they lit my life on fire.

The first in this last crazy-making category was Sheila Heti’sHow Should A Person Be?, which is a novel, but like a photograph presents an image of real people. Using recorded conversations with her friends, stray thoughts on the nature of genius, and details from her personal and professional life, Sheila Heti has managed to collage these real experiences to create — or perhaps, more accurately, curate — an impressive work of fiction.

To express their love, Sheila and her friends are always trying to make each other feel famous, by taking pictures of each other, writing stories about each other, painting each other’s portraits. If you’re on Facebook, you will probably recognize a little of yourself here. And yet Heti’s characteristically gamine voice cuts through the cloudy sentimentality that can settle over the divide between authenticity and the appearance of authenticity, between fame and celebration. The novel is an attempt at answering the titular question, and the mingling of the real and unreal, the recorded and the ethereal events in her life makes for a fantastically compelling read. Heti’s ultimately a genius for being able to so powerfully and lucidly demonstrate that the answer to the question of How Should a Person Be? is to keep on asking the question, and to keep on committing to being as a person should.

The other book I had to read twice was Tao Lin’sShoplifting From American Apparel. I thought I hated it, and I went back to it, just to make sure. It’s actually really brilliant. Like How Should a Person Be?, SLFAA blurs autobiographical events and recorded conversation together to produce something fictional. But there are so many key differences, and I’m only really drawing the connection now, months later. SLFAA chronicles the small adventures of a Tao Lin-type guy named Sam. The book opens with a conversation Sam is having with his friend, Louis, over Google chat. Instead of providing an ugly and vaguely digitized transcript of this conversation, Lin tags these dialogs with the word “said,” which kind of blew my mind. Here was an element of emotional verisimilitude, of experiential recognition, that completely shocked me; because I’m part of the generation that grew up online, I felt like I had found a mirror. The reason that I thought I hated this book was because the rest of the reflection that Lin provides is incredibly vague. SLFAA is full of unmoored things, signifiers unburdened from the responsibility of meaning, and the entire work reads like a staccato surface of the partially observed. And who knew this sort of thing was even possible, let alone incredibly readable? So it’s brilliant, and I still kind of hate it, but holy hell has Shoplifting From American Apparel ever lit me up.

Carolyn Kellogg is a displaced Angeleno getting her MFA in fiction at the University of Pittsburgh. She blogs about books at www.pinkyspaperhaus.com.What Makes Sammy Run by Budd Schulburg. A classic Hollywood novel that was a surprise hit in 1941, it’s set in the thirties and plays as kind of a twisted Gatsby. And it’s remarkably contemporary; as the book’s screenwriters struggle for leverage with the studios, they sound a lot like the screenwriters striking today.Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe. Set in a dystopian future, this retelling of the settlement of Jamestown, Virginia is actually a soft-hearted romance. If it includes a lot of blood, death and fear and a flaying or two, well, that’s historical accuracy for you. It’s funny, punny, brutal and sweet all at once.More from A Year in Reading 2007

It’s probably easiest to summarize my year in reading by relating a decision that came to typify my next 11 months with regards to books: I chose a long-awaited beach vacation with family as the time to finally sit down with The Year of Magical Thinking. There are few experiences quite so disorienting as thumbing through 200 pages worth of eviscerating grief (and near-matchless prose) in between body surfing and tossing a frisbee on a humid beach. Despite a bit of environmentally-inspired cognitive dissonance, I found the book to be everything that everyone had lauded it for/warned me about; it’s difficult to imagine ever reading another memoir about the loss of a loved one that captures the particularity of grief more capably than Joan Didion. That is, unless you want to talk about another book of Didion’s that is the worst kind of companion piece, Blue Nights.

As an independent bookseller-cum-college student slouching towards graduation, temptation to read is at an all-time high and time itself is at a premium. It would be dishonest of me to say that I don’t carve out a disturbing amount of my free time for some of life’s finer pleasures like binge watching nature documentaries and, more recently, pouring hours into Fallout 4. I imagine these luxuries are not afforded to my rooted friends with little ones and spouses, and I suspect this decision-anxiety is familiar for anyone who balances a career and a family. Nevertheless, my decision about what to read next was made by a mostly haphazard combination of chance and odd luck, having less to do with a conscious decision than with a serendipitous whim or a particularly bountiful bookstore shipment. That said, I managed to read a whole bunch of stuff.

Like everyone else in the world, I loved Ta-Nehisi Coates’sBetween the World and Me — as far as I’m concerned, it’s deserving of all of the accolades and then some. A few surprise non-fiction favorites included One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norwayby Åsne Seierstad and Widow Basquiat by Jennifer Clement. Seierstad’s book is, as the heavy-handed subtitle suggests, the fascinating story of Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik from pre-birth to purgatorial present in prison — it’s hard to put down in the way that a car accident on the highway is hard to look away from. Clement’s book, on the other hand, is by turns delicate and lacerating in its riveting, poetic portrayal of the relationship between artistic savant Jean-Michel Basquiat and his partner/muse Suzanne Mallouk. As for drama, a customer’s suggestion to check out Middletown led to a months-long affair with all things Will Eno — it left me feeling even more suburban and despondent than usual (in a good way?).

Poetry is my real first love, and it’s the area where I found myself devoting most of my squirreled-away reading time. A ton of poets that I admire released collections this year — two of my longtime favorites, John Ashbery and Yusef Komunyakaa, each have new books out. Some of the new releases that I enjoyed a great deal were those by Terrance Hayes, Nick Flynn, Dorothea Lasky, Deborah Landau, and Richard Siken. A chance encounter with Elegy Owedby Bob Hicok mutated into near-total immersion in his body of work — Bob, if you’re reading this, I’m finished and I need some new poems.

The most interesting poetic rabbit hole I stumbled down this year began with reading A Question Mark Above the Sun by Kent Johnson. In Johnson’s bizarre book, he alleges that Frank O’Hara’s poem “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” (which was first discovered and recited by O’Hara’s longtime friend Kenneth Koch at a memorial event celebrating the poet’s life) was actually written by Koch and “given” to O’Hara as a kind of private elegy to his closest friend. It’s may be the most touching gesture in the history of poetry or a totally outrageous accusation — either way, it was the gateway book that led to my mainlining a dangerous cocktail of New York poetry which included the likes of Koch, James Schuyler, and Ted Berrigan.

A surprise reading trend that cropped up this past year included burning through collection after collection of unbelievable short stories by some frighteningly talented women. Like many others, I drank the Clarice Lispector Kool-Aid and trudged through her Complete Stories in a bewildered haze that I’m not sure I ever made it back out of. I prefer Lispector’s slim, puzzling novels to her stories, unlike another South American woman whose collection I read and loved, Silvina Ocampo. Ocampo’s stories are in the vein of a magical realism where all of the playful niceties are replaced by an unforgiving and overt brutality — needless to say, they are pretty badass. Collections by Lucia Berlin and Joy Williams were also among some of the best.

Atticus Lish’sPreparation for the Next Life was the most memorable — if profoundly depressing — novel that I spent time with this year. It shares my top fiction spot with Cow Country, a bizarre book penned by Adrian Jones Pearson, an openly self-identified pseudonym, and published by a nonexistent publishing house. The star of a few speculative pieces about the identity of its author (the most popular of which is Thomas Pynchon), Cow Country is smart and hilarious and incisive no matter who wrote it. Some of my other fiction favorites included Jesse Ball’sA Cure for Suicide, Per Petterson’sI Refuse, and Ottessa Moshfegh’sEileen. My biggest letdown was Bill Clegg’sDid You Ever Have a Family, for which my expectations were too high and my disappointment now is total and all-encompassing. I found it far too guarded and vanilla for the same man who shocked my sensibilities with a couple of brilliant, fully-realized memoirs about an addiction to crack cocaine.

In writing this, it occurred to me that I must have had more time to read than I remember, or else I just didn’t take great care of myself, because I read a ton of books. However, for everything I read and loved, I watched another 10 books languish on the shelves at my store, knowing I would never have the time to pick them up. As far as figuring out what to read next is concerned, it seems that the stakes are higher than we often give them credit for; the decision is an expressed commitment to an ideal, be it beauty or bacchanalia. Or maybe I just want my job to feel important. And so we beat on, I guess.

The two novels that struck me most this year were Sarah Orne Jewett’sThe Country of the Pointed Firs and Nikolai Leskov’sThe Enchanted Wanderer. Both are small masterpieces of great aesthetic and cosmological elegance, told in deceptively anecdotal styles. Both are episodic and both wear their sophistication lightly.

The Country of Pointed the Pointed Firs is set in Dunnett’s Landing, a coastal village in Maine, which is a kind of outpost at the edge of this world, a kind of staging for not only ocean journeys but also final journeys. The characters are isolated and mostly live alone with their own “poor insistent human nature[s].” Being solitary, the characters take delight in reunions and fellowship, and practice tact informed by the old idea of I and Thou. There is a deeply moving current in the book that one’s own humanity is confirmed and preserved to the extent that one bears witness to and respects the integrity of the humanity of others.

The Enchanted Wanderer is absurd and profound and hair-raising. It follows the wanderings of Ivan, a half-wild, half-holy peasant suspended between the realms of pagan and Christian Russia. The tension in the story is generated by his swings between these extremes. He flees through steppes and woods and cities, among imps and mesmerists and Gypsies and Tartars and angels and demons. As he makes his way he tells and retells his story to almost everyone he meets, and in this manner they are all gathered up into the story, too, which he then takes along with him to the next station, the next telling. It is a soulful and humane cosmic comedy.

Rodger Jacobs, author of the book Christopher Walken and the Tuna Fish Sandwich and Other L.A. Stories, shares with us the best books he read this year.Best books I’ve read this year? Well, I’m still going to stand behind Michelle Huneven’s Jamesland even though I had some minor quibbles with it. Next to that I would have to go with the stunning debut novel by Canadian journalist Robert Hough, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark. I can think of no other contemporary writer — with the obvious exception of Ron Hansen with Hitler’s Niece and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford — who has mastered the historical novel in such a vibrant and highly engrossing style. It’s a lengthy tome (440 pages) and by the time you have read the last page you feel that you have lived Mabel Stark’s life side-by-side with this amazing yet deeply troubled woman. The book is so evocative that I still — almost a year after having read it — have sense memories attached to the novel, the scents attached to circus life, the wet hay during sudden storm bursts, the kerosene lamp in Mabel’s railroad car. This was such a master work that I am anxious to see if Hough can follow it up or if, sadly, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime book like Leonard Gardner’s Fat City or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The book is that damn good.Thanks for that. That bit about “once-in-a-lifetime books” at the end made me think. Many a VH1 special is devoted to the musical one-hit wonder, but what about the literary variety? Who’s on that list? And what do these authors have in common? Hmmm… food for thought.

Writing these Year in Reading round-ups has become a sort of annual audit of personal failures. Looking back over the ones I’ve done in the past, a theme of temporal exasperation has gradually risen to the surface. The older I get, the less time I have for reading (or, for that matter, anything else). This is exasperating partly because I happen to like reading, all things being equal — I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t — but mostly because reading is a non-negotiable aspect of my job as a writer, and of my life as a human being. My understanding is that if I don’t read enough, some vague but inexorable process of atrophy will begin to take hold. (I’m just figuring this out as I go along here, but is it possible that my anxiety about reading is in fact hopelessly bound up with my anxiety about death? I’ll take a wild leap here and suggest that it is, in much the same way as absolutely everything else is too.)

But it’s not just a matter of reading, of course, it’s a matter of reading the right things; and this leads to a certain deep-seated restlessness when it comes to reading, an abiding suspicion that, no matter what book I’m reading, there’s always some other book I might be better off spending my increasingly limited time with. So when I look back over my year in reading, I find myself surveying a melancholy vista of half-finished books, of books bought but never started, of books read two thirds of the way through before being abandoned — always, of course, with the earnest intention of returning — for some other book, whose presence momentarily exerted a much more urgent pressure on my attention, only to then meet its own similar fate of abandonment. This grievous state of affairs is painful to contemplate for two reasons: It causes me to suspect myself of intellectual shallowness — a symptom, I sometimes think, of an even graver lack of moral seriousness — and it arises, paradoxically, out of an unshakable sense of the existential importance of reading as an activity. Which is to say that my reading habits, chaotic and undisciplined as they are, are guided by an abiding conviction that every book I read has the potential to change my life. (This doesn’t happen very often, nor I suppose would I want it to, but it’s the potential that matters, that keeps me reading — and abandoning.)

Hearteningly, it seems that I did manage to finish some books in 2016. Looking back through my year, and doing a quick cross-check of books purchased versus books read, I’m reminded that I read a large amount of Annie Dillard. I read her newly published retrospective greatest hits collection, The Abundance, and then went back and reread stuff I’d read by her before, like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and The Writing Life and For the Time Being. I also read, for the first time, Holy the Firm, a work of hallucinatory spiritual brilliance that I don’t claim to necessarily understand — I think maybe only Dillard and the God she’s writing to, and about, fully understand that book — but which I nonetheless found thrilling and disturbing and moving. Without even trying, she came closer than 14 years of religious schooling ever did to converting me to Christianity — at least to her own wild, pantheistic, blasphemous, querulously questioning version of same. The writer she reminds me most of here, ironically, is Friedrich Nietzsche, in that she’s a performing a philosophy of fundamental things in the manner of a wild seer, in a prose of almost dangerous beauty. If ever a writer was capable of changing my life, it’s Dillard. “Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time,” she writes. And in the moment of reading, I believe, and am changed.

I went quite deep this year with Rachel Cusk. I read A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother and Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation — two memoirs, published 11 years apart, that form a kind of diptych on the subject of parenthood and divorce, and are filled with painful, uncompromising wisdom on both. I also read her two recent novels Outline and Transit(the latter of which will be published in the U.S. early next year), both of which take a strange and radical approach to what tends to get called “autofiction.” She’s inverting the equation of the autobiographical novel, in a way — both these novels are composed of a series of encounters with strangers and friends and acquaintances, whose lives she writes about, and thereby somehow creates a kind of vicarious (outline) portrait of herself, or her fictional persona. The whole project is intriguing, and quietly radical, and Cusk is one of the most consistently fascinating of contemporary writers.

Speaking of autobiographical writing, 2016 was also the year I discovered Vivian Gornick. I read her recent book The Odd Woman and the City, a beautiful meditation on being single — and, crucially, female — late in life, and being a writer, and living in Manhattan; and I read her 1987 memoir Fierce Attachments, about growing up on the same seldom-written about island, and walking around it in middle age with her elderly mother. I followed that up with The Situation and the Story, a book of very personal writing about personal writing. Just to give the bare facts of my particular story here, my situation is as follows: I’m now a committed Gornickian, and my life is once more, in at least this small respect, changed.

I got really into Lewis Mumford over the last year or so — a writer I’d never really encountered until I picked up his book Technics and Civilization. Published in 1934, it’s a historical study of the force technology has exerted, since the middle ages, over the development of human life, and an extraordinarily prescient polemic about the threats of ecological catastrophe and mechanized, automated warfare. It’s a fascinating, illuminating book, and Mumford is especially brilliant on how the logic of power proceeds from, as well as moves toward, the mechanization of human life. The era of techno-capitalism, in Mumford’s view, began long before the first modern machines were invented, because the first machines were human bodies. “Before inventors created engines to take the place of men,” he writes,
the leaders of men had drilled and regimented multitudes of human beings: they had discovered how to reduce men to machines. The slaves and peasants who hauled the stones for the pyramids, pulling in rhythm to the crack of the whip, the slaves working in the Roman galley, each man chained to his seat and unable to perform any other motion than the limited mechanical one, the order and march and system of attack of the Macedonian phalanx — these were all machine phenomena. Whatever limits the actions of human beings to their bare mechanical elements belongs to the physiology, if not the mechanics, of the machine age.
An amazing book, both very much of its time, and also completely ahead of it.

The most fascinating character I encountered in any book this year was a person named John Lennon, the protagonist of Kevin Barry’s strange and beautiful novel Beatlebone. Although this person is one of the most exhaustively written about figures of the 20th century, Barry remakes Lennon not so much from the ground up as from the inside out. Beatlebone’s Lennon is a haunted and bewildered person, not far shy of 40 — or of his nearing assassination, which hovers around the book like a malediction — who sets out for his own private island off the west coast of Ireland, in order to take stock of his life and his current creative impasse. It is a sad and funny and captivating book, filled with melancholy wisdom, delivered in Barry’s elegant and profanely poetic prose. As Lennon’s hard-bastard existentialist chauffeur puts it to him: “We have no hope. We haven’t a prayer against any of it. So throw back the shoulders…Keep the eyes straight and sober-looking in the sockets of your head. Look out at the world hard and face the fucker down.” One unexpected consequence of reading the novel was that it caused me to listen — really for the first time in any kind of serious way — to the music of The Beatles. It turns out they’re actually quite good! So now I’m a Beatles fan, a thing it hadn’t previously occurred to me I might become. And here I am: life changed, yet again.

I didn’t read — I succumbed — to The Journals of John Cheever. I picked it up one evening after the guests had gone, after the ashtrays had been emptied and the dog walked. I was lightly drunk and working on getting more seriously drunk (the Cheevering hour?); I idly opened the book — and let it have its way with me all weekend in the spare room.

It’s a disheveling, debauching book. Even a dangerous book: it invites you to contemplate — even embrace — your corruption. These journals, posthumously edited by Cheever’s longtime editor, Robert Gottlieb, are a 40-year chronicle of wanting health but plotting, ardently, self-destruction. Of struggling with alcoholism and bisexuality. Of wanting very much to love one’s wife and only one’s wife — but falling gratefully into the arms of any stranger who will have you. Of the soul as irredeemably “venereal, forlorn, and uprooted.”

Cheever had a brain and body so responsive — “touchy like a triggered rattrap” — everything he sees turns him on, makes him cry, turns him rhapsodic. Desire stains everything. And it isn’t airy, “Chopinesque longing,” no — it’s itchy and inconvenient, “as coarse and real as the hair on my belly,” he writes. “In the public urinal I am solicited by the man on my right. I do not dare turn my head. But I wonder what he looks like. No better or no worse, I guess than the rest of us in such throes.”

I love this Cheever, so lust-worn, fatigued, wise. The Cheever who observes, “I prayed for some degree of sexual continence, although the very nature of sexuality is incontinence.” But I love him more when he’s cross, crass, and ornery. When he’s querulous and moaning for “a more muscular vocabulary,” his face on a postage stamp, a more reliable erection. When he carps about his contemporaries (Calvino: “cute,” Nabokov: “all those sugared violets”). But Cheever the ecstatic, who merges with the mountain air and streams, who finds in writing and sex a bridge between the sacred and the profane and is as spontaneous and easy as a child — he is indispensable.

“Today gloomy and humid. I walk the dogs in a heavy rain. Water lilies grow at the edge of the pond. I want to pick some and take them home to Mary. I decide that this is foolish. I am a substantial man of fifty-eight, and I will walk past the lilies in a dignified manner. Having made this decision, I strip off my clothes, dive into the pond and pick a lily. I will be dignified tomorrow.”

The days are short and few. Stay up late with John Cheever. Contemplate your corruption with cheer. Be dignified tomorrow. Remember: “The morning light is gold as money and pours in the eastern windows. But it is the shadow that is exciting.”